by Neil Gaiman
There was a strange scent in the air, sharp and floral. Bod followed it up the hill to the Egyptian Walk, where the winter ivy hung in green tumbles, an evergreen tangle that hid the mock-Egyptian walls and statues and hieroglyphs.
The perfume was heaviest there, and for a moment Bod wondered if snow might have fallen, for there were white clusters on the greenery. Bod examined a cluster more closely. It was made of small five-petaled flowers, and he had just put his head in to sniff the perfume when he heard footsteps coming up the path.
Bod Faded into the ivy, and watched. Three men and a woman, all alive, came up the path and into the Egyptian Walk. The woman had an ornate chain around her neck.
“Is this it?” she asked.
“Yes, Mrs. Caraway,” said one of the men—chubby and white-haired and short of breath. Like each of the men, he carried a large, empty wicker basket.
She seemed both vague and puzzled. “Well, if you say so,” she said. “But I cannot say that I understand it.” She looked up at the flowers. “What do I do now?”
The smallest of the men reached into his wicker basket and brought out a tarnished pair of silver scissors. “The scissors, Lady Mayoress, “he said.
She took the scissors from him and began to cut the clumps of blossom, and she and the three men started to fill the baskets with the flowers.
“This is,” said Mrs. Caraway, the Lady Mayoress, after a little while, “perfectly ridiculous.”
“It is,” said the fat man, “a tradition.”
“Perfectly ridiculous,” said Mrs. Caraway, but she continued to cut the white blossoms and drop them into the wicker baskets. When they had filled the first basket, she asked, “Isn’t that enough?”
“We need to fill all four baskets,” said the smaller man, “and then distribute a flower to everyone in the Old Town.”
“And what kind of tradition is that?” said Mrs. Caraway. “I asked the Lord Mayor before me, and he said he’d never heard of it.” Then she said, “Do you get a feeling someone’s watching us?”
“What?” said the third man, who had not spoken until now. He had a beard and a turban and two wicker baskets. “Ghosts, you mean? I do not believe in ghosts.”
“Not ghosts,” said Mrs. Caraway. “Just a feeling like someone’s looking.”
Bod fought the urge to push further back into the ivy.
“It’s not surprising that the previous Lord Mayor did not know about this tradition,” said the chubby man, whose basket was almost full. “It’s the first time the winter blossoms have bloomed in eighty years.”
The man with the beard and the turban, who did not believe in ghosts, was looking around him nervously.
“Everyone in the Old Town gets a flower,” said the small man. “Man, woman, and child.” Then he said, slowly, as if he were trying to remember something he had learned a very long time ago, “One to leave and one to stay and all to dance the Macabray.”
Mrs. Caraway sniffed. “Stuff and nonsense,” she said, and kept on snipping the blossoms.
Dusk fell early in the afternoon, and it was night by half past four. Bod wandered the paths of the graveyard, looking for someone to talk to, but there was no one about. He walked down to the Potter’s Field to see if Liza Hempstock was about, but found no one there. He went back to the Owenses’ tomb, but found it also deserted: neither his father nor Mistress Owens was anywhere to be seen.
Panic started then, a low-level panic. It was the first time in his ten years that Bod could remember feeling abandoned in the place he had always thought of as his home: he ran down the hill to the old chapel, where he waited for Silas.
Silas did not come.
“Perhaps I missed him,” thought Bod, but he did not believe this. He walked up the hill to the very top, and looked out. The stars hung in the chilly sky, while the patterned lights of the city spread below him, streetlights and car headlights and things in motion. He walked slowly down from the hill until he reached the graveyard’s main gates, and he stopped there.
He could hear music.
Bod had listened to all kinds of music: the sweet chimes of the ice-cream van, the songs that played on workmen’s radios, the tunes that Claretty Jake played the dead on his dusty fiddle, but he had never heard anything like this before: a series of deep swells, like the music at the beginning of something, a prelude perhaps, or an overture.
He slipped through the locked gates, walked down the hill, and into the Old Town.
He passed the Lady Mayoress, standing on a corner, and as he watched, she reached out and pinned a little white flower to the lapel of a passing businessman.
“I don’t make personal charitable donations,” said the man. “I leave that to the office.”
“It’s not for charity,” said Mrs. Caraway. “It’s a local tradition.”
“Ah,” he said, and he pushed his chest out, displaying the little white flower to the world, and walked off, proud as Punch.
A young woman pushing a baby buggy was the next to go past.
“Wossit for?” she asked suspiciously, as the Mayoress approached.
“One for you, one for the little one,” said the Mayoress.
She pinned the flower to the young woman’s winter coat. She stuck the flower for the baby to its coat with tape.
“But wossit for?” asked the young woman.
“It’s an Old Town thing,” said the Lady Mayoress, vaguely. “Some sort of tradition.”
Bod walked on. Everywhere he went he saw people wearing the white flowers. On the other street corners, he passed the men who had been with the Lady Mayoress, each man with a basket, handing out the white flowers. Not everyone took a flower, but most people did.
The music was still playing: somewhere, at the edge of perception, solemn and strange. Bod cocked his head to one side, trying to locate where it was coming from, without success. It was in the air and all around. It was playing in the flapping of flags and awnings, in the rumble of distant traffic, the click of heels on the dry paving stones…
And there was an oddness, thought Bod, as he watched the people heading home. They were walking in time to the music.
The man with the beard and the turban was almost out of flowers. Bod walked over to him.
“Excuse me,” said Bod.
The man started. “I did not see you,” he said, accusingly.
“Sorry,” said Bod. “Can I have a flower as well?”
The man with the turban looked at Bod with suspicion. “Do you live around here?” he asked.
“Oh yes,” said Bod.
The man passed Bod a white flower. Bod took it, then said, “Ow,” as something stabbed into the base of his thumb.
“You pin it to your coat,” said the man. “Watch out for the pin.”
A bead of crimson was coming up on Bod’s thumb. He sucked at it while the man pinned the flower to Bod’s sweater. “I’ve never seen you around here,” he told Bod.
“I live here, all right,” said Bod. “What are the flowers for?”
“It was a tradition in the Old Town,” said the man, “before the city grew up around it. When the winter flowers bloom in the graveyard on the hill they are cut and given out to everybody, man or woman, young or old, rich or poor.”
The music was louder now. Bod wondered if he could hear it better because he was wearing the flower—-he could make out a beat, like distant drums, and a skirling, hesitant melody that made him want to pick up his heels and march in time to the sound.
Bod had never walked anywhere as a sightseer before. He had forgotten the prohibitions on leaving the graveyard, forgotten that tonight in the graveyard on the hill the dead were no longer in their places; all that he thought of was the Old Town, and he trotted through it down to the municipal gardens in front of the Old Town Hall (which was now a museum and tourist information center, the town hall itself having moved into much more imposing, if newer and duller, offices halfway across the city).
There were already people
around, wandering the municipal gardens—now in midwinter, little more than a large grassy field with, here and there, some steps, a shrub, a statue.
Bod listened to the music, entranced. There were people trickling into the square, in ones and twos, in families or alone. He had never seen so many living people at one time. There must have been hundreds of them, all of them breathing, each of them as alive as he was, each with a white flower.
Is this what living people do? thought Bod, but he knew that it was not: that this, whatever it was, was special.
The young woman he had seen earlier pushing a baby buggy stood beside him, holding her baby, swaying her head to the music.
“How long does the music go on for?” Bod asked her, but she said nothing, just swayed and smiled. Bod did not think she smiled much normally. And only when he was certain that she had not heard him, that he had Faded, or was simply not someone she cared enough about to listen to, she said, “Blimmen ’eck. It’s like Christmases.” She said it like a woman in a dream, as if she was seeing herself from the outside. In the same not-really-there tone of voice, she said, “Puts me in mind of me Gran’s sister, Aunt Clara. The night before Christmas we’d go to her, after me Gran passed away, and she’d play music on her old piano, and she’d sing, sometimes, and we’d eat chocolates and nuts and I can’t remember any of the songs she sung. But that music, it’s like all of them songs playing at once.”
The baby seemed asleep with its head on her shoulder, but even the baby was swaying its hands gently in time to the music.
And then the music stopped and there was silence in the square, a muffled silence, like the silence of falling snow, all noise swallowed by the night and the bodies in the square, no one stamping or shuffling, scarcely even breathing.
A clock began to strike somewhere close at hand: the chimes of midnight, and they came.
They walked down the hill in a slow procession, all stepping gravely, all in time, filling the road, five abreast. Bod knew them or knew most of them. In the first row, he recognized Mother Slaughter and Josiah Worthington, and the old earl who had been wounded in the Crusades and came home to die, and Doctor Trefusis, all of them looking solemn and important.
There were gasps from the people in the square. Someone began to cry, saying, “Lord have mercy, it’s a judgment on us, that’s what it is!” Most of the people simply stared, as unsurprised as they would have been if this had happened in a dream.
The dead walked on, row on row, until they reached the square.
Josiah Worthington walked up the steps until he reached Mrs. Caraway, the Lady Mayoress. He extended his arm and said, loud enough that the whole square could hear him, “Gracious lady, this I pray: Join me in the Macabray.”
Mrs. Caraway hesitated. She glanced up at the man beside her for guidance: he wore a robe and pajamas and slippers, and he had a white flower pinned to the lapel of his robe. He smiled and nodded to Mrs. Caraway. “Of course,” Mr. Caraway said.
She reached out a hand. As her fingers touched Josiah Worthington’s, the music began once more. If the music Bod had heard until then was a prelude, it was a prelude no longer. This was the music they had all come to hear, a melody that plucked at their feet and fingers.
They took hands, the living with the dead, and they began to dance. Bod saw Mother Slaughter dancing with the man in the turban, while the businessman was dancing with Louisa Bartleby. Mistress Owens smiled at Bod as she took the hand of the old newspaper seller, and Mr. Owens reached out and took the hand of a small girl, without condescension, and she took his hand as if she had been waiting to dance with him her whole life. Then Bod stopped looking because someone’s hand closed around his, and the dance began.
Liza Hempstock grinned at him. “This is fine,” she said, as they began to tread the steps of the dance together.
Then she sang, to the tune of the dance,
“Step and turn, and walk and stay,
Now we dance the Macabray.”
The music filled Bod’s head and chest with a fierce joy, and his feet moved as if they knew the steps already, had known them forever.
He danced with Liza Hempstock, and then, when that measure ended, he found his hand taken by Fortinbras Bartleby, and he danced with Fortinbras, stepping past lines of dancers, lines that parted as they came through.
Bod saw Abanazer Bolger dancing with Miss Borrows, his old former teacher. He saw the living dancing with the dead. And the one-on-one dances became long lines of people stepping together in unison, walking and kicking (La-la-la-oomp! La-la-la-oomp!) a line dance that had been ancient a thousand years before.
Now he was in the line beside Liza Hempstock. He said, “Where does the music come from?”
She shrugged.
“Who’s making all this happen?”
“It always happens,” she told him. “The living may not remember, but we always do…” And she broke off, excited. “Look!”
Bod had never seen a real horse before, only in the pages of picture books, but the white horse that clopped down the street towards them was nothing like the horses he had imagined. It was bigger, by far, with a long, serious face. There was a woman riding on the horse’s bare back, wearing a long grey dress that hung and gleamed beneath the December moon like cobwebs in the dew.
She reached the square, and the horse stopped, and the woman in grey slipped off it easily and stood on the earth, facing them all, the living and the dead of them.
She curtseyed.
And, as one, they bowed or curtseyed in return, and the dance began anew.
“Now the Lady on the Grey
Leads us in the Macabray,”
sang Liza Hempstock, before the whirl of the dance took her off and away from Bod. They stomped to the music, and stepped and spun and kicked, and the lady danced with them, stepping and spinning and kicking with enthusiasm. Even the white horse swayed its head and stepped and shifted to the music.
The dance sped up, and the dancers with it. Bod was breathless, but he could not imagine the dance ever stopping: the Macabray, the dance of the living and the dead, the dance with Death. Bod was smiling, and everyone was smiling.
He caught sight of the lady in the grey dress from time to time, as he spun and stomped his way across the municipal gardens.
Everyone, thought Bod, everyone is dancing! He thought it, and as soon as he thought it he realized that he was mistaken. In the shadows by the Old Town Hall, a man was standing, dressed all in black. He was not dancing. He was watching them.
Bod wondered if it was longing that he saw on Silas’s face, or sorrow, or something else, but his guardian’s face was unreadable.
He called out, “Silas!” hoping to make his guardian come to them, to join the dance, to have the fun they were having, but when he heard his name, Silas stepped back into the shadows and was lost to sight.
“Last dance!” someone called, and the music skirled up into something stately and slow and final.
Each of the dancers took a partner, the living with the dead, each to each. Bod reached out his hand and found himself touching fingers with, and gazing into the grey eyes of, the lady in the cobweb dress.
She smiled at him.
“Hello, Bod,” she said.
“Hello,” he said, as he danced with her. “I don’t know your name.”
“Names aren’t really important,” she said.
“I love your horse. He’s so big! I never knew horses could be that big.”
“He is gentle enough to bear the mightiest of you away on his broad back, and strong enough for the smallest of you as well.”
“Can I ride him?” asked Bod.
“One day,” she told him, and her cobweb skirts shimmered. “One day. Everybody does.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
And with that, the dance was done. Bod bowed low to his dancing partner, and then, and only then, did he feel exhausted, feel as if he had been dancing for hour after hour. He could fe
el all his muscles aching and protesting. He was out of breath.
A clock somewhere began to strike the hour, and Bod counted along with it. Twelve chimes. He wondered if they had been dancing for twelve hours or twenty-four or for no time at all.
He straightened up, and looked around him. The dead had gone, and the Lady on the Grey. Only the living remained, and they were beginning to make their way home—leaving the town square sleepily, stiffly, like people who had awakened from a deep sleep, walking without truly waking.
The town square was covered with tiny white flowers. It looked as if there had been a wedding.
Bod woke the next afternoon in the Owenses’ tomb feeling like he knew a huge secret, that he had done something important, and was burning to talk about it.
When Mistress Owens got up, Bod said, “That was amazing last night!”
Mistress Owens said, “Oh yes?”
“We danced,” said Bod. “All of us. Down in the Old Town.”
“Did we indeed?” said Mistress Owens, with a snort. “Dancing is it? And you know you aren’t allowed down into the town.”
Bod knew better than even to try to talk to his mother when she was in this kind of mood. He slipped out of the tomb into the gathering dusk.
He walked up the hill, to the black obelisk, and Josiah Worthington’s stone, where there was a natural amphitheater, and he could look out at the Old Town and at the lights of the city around it.
Josiah Worthington was standing beside him.
Bod said, “You began the dance. With the Mayor. You danced with her.”
Josiah Worthington looked at him and said nothing.
“You did,” said Bod.
Josiah Worthington said, “The dead and the living do not mingle, boy. We are no longer part of their world; they are no part of ours. If it happened that we danced the danse macabre with them, the dance of death, then we would not speak of it, and we certainly would not to speak of it to the living.”
“But I’m one of you.”
“Not yet, boy. Not for a lifetime.”
